Analysis of the Concept of Disinformation from Peirce’s Semiotics

Abstract

Adopting the perspective of Peircean semiotics, the work proposes to analyze the concept of disin-formation based on the phenomenon of fake news and the “post-truth” neologism associated with it. We review some contemporary informational theories, which start from the relationship between communication, computing, society and technologies, to demonstrate the need to broaden the strictly analytical view of the concept of information, albeit grounded in cybernetics, to include the reflection of semiotics and pragmatism of Peirce. We will briefly present the foundations of semiotics, mainly in its relation to the concepts of beliefs and truth that form the framework of pragmatism. We propose, in particular, three complementary dimensions of the term disinformation based on some semiotic precepts that, in our view, allow a better understanding of its manifestation in the communicative processes present in social media.